Joe Rogers: How Noah killed off the dinosaurs

The most intriguing candidate by far this election season is not running for president. She's running for the Texas State Board of Education. Her name is Mary Lou Bruner, and in photos she comes across as pretty much the default image of somebody's mother, or grandmother. Except, perhaps, for the American flag jacket she seems to favor. Her campaign website notes her bachelor's and master's degrees in education and her 36 years' experience as a teacher, counselor and diagnostician. She is no fan of what she considers federal overreach into education. If elected, she says, "I will stand for Texas values - your values." But you have to

to find her version of Texas values, because she doesn't list them all on the campaign website. Nor does she list them on her Facebook page anymore, because, well, some folks found them a little odd. Or more than a little. Mind you, some of it was just garden-variety Confederate mythology and Christian fundamentalism, like her belief that slavery wasn't really a factor leading to the Civil War and that school shootings are the result of taking prayer and the Ten Commandments out of the classroom, and a strong preference for the biblical story of creationism rather than godless evolution. Shoot, maybe you believe in all that. A lot of people do. But she did turn a few heads with her explanation for the extinction of dinosaurs: It was Noah's fault for not fully appreciating the limitations of his cargo: "The dinosaurs on [Noah's ark] may have been babies and not able to reproduce. ... After the flood, the few remaining Behemoths and Leviathans may have become extinct because there was not enough vegetation on earth for them to survive to reproductive age." She's no fan of Muslims, either, whom she suspects of trying to influence young people's minds by subversively infiltrating their views into textbooks. And of wanting to wipe out the rest of us. "The USA should ban Islam and stop all immigration ... from Muslim countries because Islam's stated goal is to conquer the USA and kill the infidels," she wrote at one point, infidels being defined as everybody who isn't a follower of Islam. Which, by the way, is not a religion, according to the Bruner theology: "Islam is an inhumane totalitarian political ideology with radical religious rules and laws and barbaric punishments for breaking the religious rules." Among other Brunerisms: "Climate change has nothing to do with weather or climate; it is all about system change from capitalism (free enterprise) to Socialism-Communism. The Climate Change HOAX was Karl Marx's idea." "Obama has a soft spot for homosexuals because of the years he spent as a male prostitute in his twenties. That's how he paid for his drugs." "It is a goal of United Nation's agenda 21 and the One World Order to reduce the population of the world by 2/3." "Many people believe the Democrat Party had JFK killed because the socialists and Communists in the party did not want a conservative president. Remember who followed JFK as president -- (LBJ). the exact opposite of Kennedy -- a socialist and an unethical politician." At this point you may believe that the electoral process will take care of Mary Lou Bruner, and that the good people of Texas will send her back into retirement. But the good people of Texas gave her 48 percent of the vote in the first Republican primary. She's in a runoff in May. There's an old saying that goes, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." We may have a case study here.

Joe Rogers, a native of Moss Point, is a staff editor for The New York Times. He lives in New Hyde Park, N.Y., and can be reached at jrogink@gmail.com and on Twitter @jrogink.